How to use the Document Scanner
- Take or choose a photo of the page, ideally on a background darker than the paper.
- Check the four detected corners and drag them onto the page corners if needed.
- Pick a look (enhanced colour, greyscale or black and white) and a page size, then click “Add page”.
- Repeat for more pages, reorder them, then download a PDF or JPG files.
Tips for a good scan
Place the paper on a surface darker than the page, such as a dark tablecloth or wooden desk, so edge detection is reliable. Use even light, avoid the shadow of your phone, and let the page fill at least half the frame. Some tilt is fine because the tool straightens it, but keep the page flat and the corners visible.
Colour, greyscale or black and white?
Enhanced colour stretches brightness and contrast and suits contracts or invoices with coloured stamps and signatures. Greyscale is ideal for plain text and gives smaller files. Black and white uses an adaptive threshold to turn shadows and paper tone into pure white and text into solid black, like a photocopy; it is best for OCR but can lose photos and faint pencil.
Page sizes and PDF
Choosing A4 or Letter outputs the page at that paper ratio so the PDF prints at the original size. “As photographed” keeps the real proportions, which suits receipts and business cards. Each PDF page is a JPEG image; use our PDF tools afterwards to compress, merge or number pages.
Privacy
Photos of IDs, contracts and medical letters often hold sensitive data. Edge detection, perspective correction, filters and PDF creation all run in your browser, nothing is uploaded and everything is cleared when you close the page. Exported images are re-encoded, so location and other EXIF data from the original photo are not carried into the PDF.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to install an app?
No. Open this page in your phone’s browser to take photos, or choose existing photos on a computer.
What if the page edges are not found?
A default frame appears; drag its four corners onto the page corners. Re-shooting the page on a darker background also helps a lot.
Can I scan several pages?
Yes. Click “Add page” after each one, reorder or delete pages, and combine them into one PDF.
Is the PDF searchable?
No, its pages are images. For text, send the scan to Image to Text, or run OCR on the PDF with our PDF tools.
Are images uploaded?
No. All processing happens in your browser.
How sharp is the output?
The long side of each page is up to about 2,480 px, roughly A4 at 300 dpi, which is enough for printing and archiving. Missing detail in a low-resolution photo cannot be recreated.